Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

The author, R. A. Lafferty, might well adopt the proud phrase used by John Collier to describe his Fancies and Goodnights; his stories are “tales unlike other tales. ”

Barnaby phoned up John Sourwine. If you frequent places like Barnaby’s Barn (there is one in every port city of the world, and John is a familiar in all of them) you may already know John Sourwine; and you will know him as Sour John.

“There’s an odd one down here,” Barnaby told him.

“How odd?” asked Sour John. He collected odd ones.

“Clear coon-dog crazy, John. He looks like they just dug him up, but he’s lively enough.”

Barnaby runs a fine little place that offers eating and drinking and conversation, all of them rare and hearty. And John Sourwine is always interested in new things, or old things returned. So John went down to Barnaby’s Barn to see the Odd One.

There was no need to ask which one he was, though there were always strangers and traveling men and seamen unknown to John in the Barn. The Odd One stood out. He was a big, spare, rough fellow, and he said that his name was McSkee. He was eating and drinking with a chortling pleasure, and they all watched him in amazement

“It’s his fourth plate of spaghetti,” Smokehouse confided to Sour John, “and that is the last of two dozen eggs. He’s had twelve hamburgers, six coney islands, six crab-burgers, five foot-long hot dogs, eighteen bottles of beer, and twenty cups of coffee.”

“Blind blinking binnacles! He must be getting close to some of the records of Big Bucket Bulg,” Sour John exclaimed with sudden interest.

“John, he’s broken most of those records already,” Smokehouse told him, and Barnaby nodded assent. “If he can hold the pace for another forty-five minutes, he’ll beat them all.”

Well, the Odd One was still a spare fellow, with a great gangling frame designed to carry fifty or sixty pounds more than the lean fellow now owned. But he began to fill out even as John watched him; and it was not only that he bulked larger almost by the minute, it was also as though a light was being turned on inside him. He glowed. Then he shone. Then he began to sparkle.

“You like to eat, do you, oldtimer?” Sour John asked the Odd One, the amazing McSkee.

“I like it well enough!” McSkee boomed with a happy grin. “But, more than that, it’s just that I’m a bedamned showoff! I like everything in excess. I love to be in the roaring middle of it all!”

“One would think that you hadn’t eaten in a hundred years,” Sour John probed.

“You’re quick!” the illuminated McSkee laughed. “A lot of them never do catch onto me, and I tell them nothing unless they guess a little first. Aye, you’ve got the hairy ears, though, and the adder’s eyes of a true gentleman. I love a really ugly man. We will talk while I eat.”

“What do you do when you’ve finished eating?” asked John, pleased at the compliments, as the waiters began to pile the steaks high in front of McSkee.

“Oh, I go from eating to drinking,” McSkee munched out. “There’s no sharp dividing line between the pleasures. I go from drinking to the girls; from the girls to fighting and roistering. And finally I sing.”

“A bestial procedure,” said John with admiration. “And when your pentastomic orgy is finished?”

“Oh, then I sleep,” McSkee chuckled. “Watch how I do it some time. I should give lessons. Few men understand how it should be done.”

“Well, how long do you sleep?” Sour John asked, “and is there something spectacular about your sleeping that I don’t understand?”

“Of course it’s spectacular. And I sleep till I waken. At this also I set records.”

And McSkee was wolfing the tall pile of steaks till Sour John had a mystic vision of a steer devoured entire except for head and hide and hooves, the slaughterer’s take.

Later, they talked somewhat more leisurely as McSkee worked his way through the last half-dozen steaks—for now the edge was off his great appetite.

“In all this ostentatious bestiality, was there not one gluttony more outstanding than the others?” Sour John drew him out, “one time when you outdid even yourself?”

“Aye, there was that,” said McSkee. “There was the time when they were going to hang me with the new rope.”

“And how did you eat your way out of that one?” Sour John asked.

“At that time and in that country—it was not this one —the custom was new of giving the condemned man what he wanted to eat/’ the incandescent McSkee limned it out in his voice with the lilt of a barrel organ. “I took advantage of the new usage and stripped the countryside. It was a good supper they gave me, John, and I was to be hanged at sunup. But I had them there, for I was still eating at dawn. They could not interrupt my last meal to hang me—not when they had promised me a full meal. I stood them off that day and the night and the following day. That is longer than I usually eat, John, and I did outdo myself. That countryside had been known for its poultry and its suckling pigs and its fruits. It is known for them no longer. It never recovered.”

“Did you?”

“Oh certainly, John. But by third dawn I was filled. The edge was off my appetite, and I do not indulge thereafter.”

“Naturally not. But what happened then? They did not hang you, or you would not be here to tell about it.”

“That doesn’t follow, John. I had been hanged before.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. But not this time. I tricked them. When I had my fill, I went to sleep. And then deeper and deeper into sleep until I died. They do not hang a man already dead. They kept me for a day to be sure. John, I get a pretty high shine on me in a day! I’m a smelly fellow at best. Then they buried me, but they did not hang me. Why do you look at me so oddly, John?”

“It is nothing,” said Sour John, “a mere random objection which I will not even dignify with words.”

McSkee was drinking now, first wine to give a bottom to his stomach, then brandy for its rumpled dignity, then rum for its plain friendliness.

“Can you believe that all breakthroughs are achieved by common men like myself?” this McSkee asked suddenly.

“I can’t believe that you’re a common man,” Sour John told him.

“I’m the commonest man you ever saw,” McSkee insisted. “I am made from the clay and the salt of the Earth, and the humus from decayed behemoths. They may have used a little extra slime in making me, but I contain none of the rare earths. It had to be a man like myself who would work out the system. The savants aren’t capable of it; they have no juice in them. And by their having no juice in them, they missed the first hint.”

“What is that, McSkee?”

“It’s so simple, John! That a man should live his life one day at a time.”

“Well?” Sour John asked with towering intonation.

“See how harmlessly it slides down, John. It sounds almost like an almanac maxim.”

“And it isn’t?”

“No, no, the thunder of a hundred worlds rumbles between them. It’s the door to a whole new universe. But there’s another saying: ‘Man, thy days are numbered. ’ This is the one inexorable saying. It is the limit that will not be bent or broken, and it puts the damper on us hearty ones. It poses a problem to one like myself, too carnal to merit eternal beatitude on another plane, too full of juice to welcome final extinction, and anxious for personal reasons to postpone the hardships of damnation as long as possible.

“Now, John, there were (and are) smarter men than myself in the world. That I solved the problem (to an extent) and they did not, means only that the problem was more pressing on me. It had to be a coarse man to find the answer, and I never met a man with such a passion for the coarse things of life as myself.”